NextGen Gallery Alternatives

[Ruairi]

Lisa

I just read your more recent comments, sorry. 🙁

Here is an example of a caption link, on the apple image. As you can see the images themselves will link to there respective Image Page, but not to any other page/post.

I'm pretty sure that can be address though.

So, I guess I should read the rest of the posts before replying!

All the best

Ruairi

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Ruairi Phelan CEO at Cyberdesign Craft.

[dev]

Lisa:

Is there a setting that lets you determine how large the picture is when (thumbnail) clicked in gallery? Or does it just become the actual size of the picture? Can you perhaps make the thumbnails smaller in the gallery>

Do you think there is a way to integrate lightbox with this plugin?

Dev

[Lisa at OG]

Dev, which plugin are you asking about? If you use the Lightbox Plus Colorbox plugin it allows you to set the Lightbox image to whatever size you would like it to be; for example, you could indicate width and height in % for responsive design or use pixels, whichever you want.

If you are referring to the thum size in the native wordpress media gallery, you can alter thumb size via the media settings but you will have to either re-upload your images to resize the thumbs OR use a plugin that regenerates thumbnails. I hope that answers your question?

Ruairi, thank you sir for that great info. I've been playing around with the cleaner gallery and it is something I think we will use. It is simple and as you say I like that it is less likely to conflict or break code. It is also good to know there is support available.

[Mealtog]

@Ruairi, nice that you found something that you were looking for. May I ask, for Cleaner Gallery to work, do you have to add text in each image with rel="prettyPhoto" before it will work properly?

I found the Next button after really having to look for it. Also tried it on mobile and could not tell if the gallery was responsive since all your images were on the small side.

I was also wondering if you could load a very large image into your gallery at http://cybercompositions.net/genesis-cleaner-gallery/

Thanks for your time here. I am curious to see the end result.

[Ruairi]

Hey Mealtog

First, that isn't prettyPhoto I have on line, that is Thickbox. You'll find Thickbox in wp-includes/js/thickbox/thickbox.js. I used Thickbox in the demo because it is simply a matter of thicking a box and you'll get a gallery lightbox.

I know you can see prettyPhoto js, thats because I was configuring prettyPhoto on my local sever just prior to uploading. But I haven't yet fully configured prettyPhoto! I am sorry if that misled you. The small next button etc are all features of Thickbox.

The cleaner gallery plugin Mealtog, extends the WordPress [gallery] shortcode, so as you can see I had to place two large images in a single column to show you. You can place just a single image - I had never tried this before now, but it states (1 image of 1) - the plugin is for galleries. The larger images don't display as well as the smaller in terms of responsiveness with Thickbox.

As a core file it would not be a great idea to edit that particular css file, besides I would prefer to use a prettyPhoto or lightbox2 gallery instead!

I'm not even one hundred percent I'll use prettyPhoto just yet, but I'll be using a responsive lightbox for the gallery for sure.

When I have finished I'll post the results and the code I used.

Again, sorry if you thought that was prettyPhoto.

Ruairi

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Ruairi Phelan CEO at Cyberdesign Craft.

[Ruairi]

@Mealtog

Just to answer your question, the plugin adds rel="prettyPhoto"

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Ruairi Phelan CEO at Cyberdesign Craft.

[Ruairi]

Hi All

I have just completed configuring prettyPhoto to Genesis via Cleaner Gallery, this is prettyPhoto as opposed to Thickbox.

functions.php

/** Load PrettyPhoto **/
add_action( 'get_header', 'prettyPhoto_scripts' );
function prettyPhoto_scripts() {

// use whatever conditional tags you need
	if ( !is_home() || !is_front_page() ) {

    wp_enqueue_script( 'prettyPhoto-min', CHILD_URL.'/lib/prettyPhoto/js/jquery-1.6.1.min.js' 	);
    wp_enqueue_style( 'prettyPhoto-css', CHILD_URL.'/lib/prettyPhoto/css/prettyPhoto.css' 		);
    wp_enqueue_script( 'prettyPhoto-js', CHILD_URL.'/lib/prettyPhoto/js/jquery.prettyPhoto.js' 	);

	}
}

/** loads prettyPhoto footer script **/
function pettyPhoto_footer_script() {
	if ( !is_home() || !is_front_page() ) {
		echo "
<script type=\"text/javascript\" charset=\"utf-8\">
    jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    jQuery(\"a[rel^='prettyPhoto']\").prettyPhoto({
	    deeplinking: false,
	    });
    });
</script>
"; }

}

Settings on For Cleaner Gallery in:
Appearance > Cleaner Gallery

Medium images by default
Images should link to full
Galleries ordered by Menu Order
Display image gallery in Ascending order

None of the checkboxes checked

External image script = prettyPhoto

And there you have it! 🙂

And yes now, I have only just learned that prettyPhoto is NOT RESPONSIVE 🙁 It's still prettyCool though!

But I need a responsive lightbox!

Oh Well!

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Ruairi Phelan CEO at Cyberdesign Craft.

[Mealtog]

Hey Ruairi, thanks for the reply and for all the info. Great work.

I am pretty sure during my testing, I also found quite a few of image plugings, some very popular to work poorly on mobile devices. I just cannot get myself to use these. Mobile usage is exponentially on the rise. And for those who deliver great looking websites to clients, imagine the looks you get when their customers tell them their website looks great but photos are not viewable on mobile. Yikes.

[sdbroker]

Hi Lisa,

Are you using the Lightbox Plus Colorbox plugin? I use it for a year or so on my son's site because of its feature to add video in addition to the images and I think it's pretty easy to use.

I haven't figured out how to make it responsive though. You mentioned using % for the image sizes. I currently have all the fields blank on the settings and off course the images are not responsive. However the videos are. What percentages should I use to make the images responsive and should I do it on the settings or add @Media sections on the plugin's css?

Thank you

[wildwebwest]

Meeee too. I appreciate all your excellent footwork Lisa @ OG. Awesome. I have ALOT of sites on nextgen and I'm sorry to see it go by the wayside but I'll try the MaxGalleria and glad you spelled out all the questions that a fellow web services provider would have. COOL. You saved me so much time and for that I am grateful.

I'll be back to report my initial install of MaxGalleria. I think for some sites, too, I may use the native wordpress create gallery as it seems so much more of a stable long term decision to just go with WP instead of having to explain to clients why this type of problem is not a free upgrade.

Thanks again. #awesome

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Wild Web West, LLC
#IHeartGenesis

[wildwebwest]

Hey friends. For those who are moving to Max Galleria, I don't find it coming up in the plugins for some reason, but do a quick search and the website is really nice.

this is a nice feature that definitely incentivizes the use of Max Galleria - a NextGEN Importer. Yey!!

NextGEN Importer Makes It Easy to Switch
Migrating away from the NextGEN Gallery plugin and switching to MaxGalleria is made extremely easy with the NextGEN Importer. With just a couple clicks, this tool will import images from your NextGEN galleries into either new or existing MaxGalleria galleries. The entire process is quick and painless, making it a snap to move away from NextGEN.

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Wild Web West, LLC
#IHeartGenesis

[Lisa at OG]

@sdbroker, Yes it is one of the options we are testing out and using. I've tried ours on a mobile phone (iPhone) and iPad and it scales down nicely but that probably has more to do with my child theme CSS than anything else. FYI, we remove the responsive code and build an addt'l specific mobile design for our clients that integrates into the same dashboard. Here's a link to our demo of the Lightbox Plus Colorbox Plugin: http://www.originalginger.com/demos/legacy1140/gallery-native-wordpress/

BTW, if any of you want to set a specific size of thumb for your gallery you can easily add a simple line of code to your functions.php identifying your new image. In our example code below we named it gallery-thumbnail:

add_image_size( 'gallery-thumbnail', 300, 300, TRUE );

Then when you create and add your native wordpress media gallery you just add an addt'l bit of code to the shortcode as follows:

[gallery link="file" ids="480,481,482,483,485,484" size="gallery-thumbnail"]

I have not yet tested this cross browser. No time today. If anyone else checks it out please let me know.

[Lisa at OG]

Hey @wildwebwest, yes I took the MaxGalleria importer for a spin and it worked like a darn!

[Lisa at OG]

@sdbroker, just took a look in the Lightbox Plus Colorbox dashboard and there is a tab in the Primary Lightbox Settings that says Size. If you click on the little blue help ? button to the right of the field it talks about setting widths in px or %. Hope that helps.

[Lisa at OG]

@wildwebwest, MaxGalleria is not in the WordPress depository. We found it elsewhere; but the developers are very responsive and we love the plugin.

[wildwebwest]

I'm going to go ahead and by the MaxGalleria developer license because I have a ton of client websites using nextgen.

(Not sure what you use for forms either but GRAVITY FORMS is absolutely awesome.)

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Wild Web West, LLC
#IHeartGenesis

[sdbroker]

@Lisa Thank you very much Lisa! Got it!

[Lisa at OG]

Just thought I'd touch base with people who participated in this thread. We've been using MaxGalleria on almost ALL of our client site builds since October 2013. Most of the quirks that existed have been worked out and the developers have added multiple uploading of images by volume. Captions now work like a dream in all the major browsers even when adding html. Still no album capability but I think that is to come soon and there are easy workarounds for that anyways. The import has worked for all of our conversions from NextGen to MaxGalleria and there were a lot!

I totally recommend it.

[coralseait]

Thank you very much Lisa for the update and sharing the experience with MaxGalleria. Sounds like the devs are on the ball.

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Coral Sea IT

[Kingsoul]

Lisa,

Thanks for this topic. I'm new to the forum, but this totally helped me out big time! Maxgalleria for me too.

[Author]

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